How Morten Jaeger and Henning Sanden built a startup generating $80k MRR without knowing how to code

If you've seen major blockbuster movies like Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Pacific Rim: Uprising — you've probably seen some of Morten Jaeger's 3D modeling work.

But after five years in the business, Morten wanted a more fulfilling career. He needed a way out of the entertainment industry.

And he wasn't the only one feeling like he needed a change. His old friend, Henning Sanden, was also ready to leave.

Morten and Henning had already been working together on projects under the name "FlippedNormals" for a couple of years, but those projects had been small in scope. This time would be different — they decided to quit their VFX jobs and see if they could turn their side projects into full-time gigs.

But they had one problem. Although they knew how to build complex three dimensional worlds, neither Morten nor Henning could code. As luck would have it, they didn't have to. They set up a bevy of no-code workarounds, making heavy use of plug-in solutions, including:

• Wordpress (and plenty of plug ins)
• TransferWise
• Transloadit, and their open source uploader, Uppy
• Jilt for abandoned cart services (and this was key!)

"If I can give one piece of advice it would be to remove all friction from the checkout process. It probably goes without saying, but that's where a lot of customers lose interest."

When each of their contracts came to a close they didn't renew. Instead, in 2018, they re-launched FlippedNormals as a curated CG marketplace for all things 2D and 3D.

For a while the ship was running smoothly. Customers were joining fast, forcing the young co-founders to find a creative way to handle the influx of new users. They hosted their vendor's files with on Amazon, but they had a huge problem with serving especially large files to their customers. Since their whole market was made up of big files, this was a huge early roadblock. No amount of tech support helped until someone offhandedly mentioned optimizing CloudFront as a possible solution, assuming they were already using the additional content deliver tool. They were not.

"Every developer reading this is probably laughing at us right about now. But this is just one example of what you face trying to set up a digital marketplace with no technical skills. Something so basic you might take for granted took us years to discover."

Now that their operational problem was behind them, they focused on attracting sellers and buyers alike to the new marketplace with their innovative affiliate hosting model.

The program is simple. When someone buys a product on their platform, FlippedNormals pays the creator a commission. They also allow creators to make money with affiliate links, even if the customer doesn't actually buy their product. With conversion rates between 4-7%, it takes a lot of creators and a lot of users to turn a profit.

They didn't expect overnight success. They set a goal of $10,000 MRR, to be able to support them both full time, but planned to live off of savings for a while. Except success came a lot sooner than they planned.

They hit that $10k goal in a few months and were making $15k by the end of the first year. Life was going their way.

The catalyst for FlippedNormal's success was their careful curation of which products they were allowed into the marketplace. Their particular guidelines reduced the amount of products on their page, but ensured those that were on the marketplace met their high standard.

"Very quickly that meant that customers noticed a difference between us and our competitors. No longer would they have to guess if a product would live up to their expectations. If we hosted it, it meant that it was a great product."

The two key drivers of their early growth were word of mouth and creating 3D CG tutorials on their YouTube channel which drove their audience to their website (though paid ads proved an expensive bust for them).

But like many businesses, 2020 came with both ups and downs due to COVID-19. They saw an early boom with their revenue doubling month over month in spring of 2020, but by November their Black Friday sale was only showing a 5% increase on their summer sale. While not the growth they were hoping for, revenue was still up overall.

Thankfully, 2021 is off to a bigger, brighter start. At just over $500,000 in revenue halfway through their fiscal year, Morten has set himself a new goal: make $1,000,000 by the end of the year. And between a growing newsletter for advertising and a score of improvements planned for the creator side of the site — he's on track to make it happen.

We asked him what advice he could share to help others replicate this rapid success. He told us:

• Create an MVP as quickly as possible
• Don't sacrifice "minimum" when creating a "viable product"; keep the small-scale goal in the back of your mind
• Test your product first hand, even as you grow, then try to use your own product routinely
• When your product lands in the hands of the users, they will do things with it you had never considered
• Don't get lost in all the business books floating around; that's only a distraction when you should sit down and build instead.

But his best advice?

Don't take advice!

"Don't get caught up in the typical advice of how you should start and run a business. Figure out what works for you and your product, take inspiration from others where it applies, but don't live by some arbitrary rule that happened to work for someone else."

Where can you go to learn more about Morten and FlippedNormals?

• Marketplace at FlippedNormals.com
• Morten's personal Twitter @mjthehunter

"I would love to hear from other people in the community that has had a similar experience. I know that the concept of 'No Code' is on the rise and it's becoming easier than ever to build platforms. I'm always looking to hear how people have solved their problems and would love to learn of better ways we can solve ours."

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